Earl Peirce, Jr.-Aside No. 2

From 1936 to 1941, Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983) had ten stories published in weird fiction magazines. His first was "Doom of the House of Duryea" (Weird Tales, Oct. 1936), published when he was nineteen. His last was "The Shadow of Nirvana" (Strange Stories, Feb. 1941), published in the month that he turned twenty-four. Those ten stories were the whole of his science fiction/fantasy output according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. (There may be one more in those genres, "The Cat," a vignette published in Fantasmagoria in the Winter issue, 1937.) Peirce had nine more stories in crime and detective titles from 1937 to 1949, this according to The FictionMags Index.*

During that same period, 1936 to 1941, Peirce's friend, contemporary, and fellow Milwaukeean Robert Bloch (1917-1994) had by himself and with other authors forty stories in the same type magazines. This is according to Thomas G.L. Cockcroft in his Index to the Weird Fiction Authors: Index by Author (1967). (If the count is off, the error is mine.) Although he had a few stories in fanzines and small magazines during the early 1930s, Bloch's first in a large or national magazine was "The Feast in the Abbey," which appeared in Weird Tales in January 1935. Bloch was just seventeen when "The Feast in the Abbey" was published, but his macabre imagination was already firmly in place. Just wait until you find out what was in his feast.

I believe that Earl Peirce, Jr., was in Milwaukee from late 1933 or early 1934 to about 1936 or 1937. Only four of his stories are from that period. A letter by Peirce printed in the July 1937 issue of Weird Tales and dispatched from Washington, D.C., indicates that he and his family had moved by then. Peirce's co-authorship of "The White Rat" (Weird Tales, Sept. 1938) with Bruce Bryan (1906-2004), who also lived in the nation's capital during the 1930s, is further indication of a move. A look at the 1940 U.S. census confirms it finally, for the whole Peirce family was in Washington, D.C., that year, and perhaps for the only time in his life, Earl Peirce, Jr., was able to tell the enumerator that he was a writer.

That leaves three or four years, from the time they were about fifteen to about age nineteen or twenty, for Robert Bloch and Earl Peirce, Jr., to have been within a stone's throw of each other in Milwaukee. A later interview with Bloch (excerpted in a future part of this series) confirms that they met and talked about writing. As we have seen, there are also connections, albeit slender, between their respective stories. But did they collaborate on bringing a new fictional universe into being? I'm not sure. Or maybe I should say probably not. Or maybe I shouldn't say that. The universe created by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and members of his circle would have been before them both as a model. Both were of course Lovecraft fans. Both were also young, enthusiastic, and ready to make their mark on the genres of fantasy and weird fiction. Bloch at least seems to have begun building a kind of a mini-mythos based on his own fictional grimoire Mysteries of the Worm (or De Vermis Mysteriis, as Lovecraft dubbed it), penned by the equally fictional Ludvig Prinn. That mini-mythos seems to have been made independently of Lovecraft's  larger (and so-called) Cthulhu Mythos. Only later--later in terms of months, I guess--did Lovecraft adapt it to his own.** Lovecraft, who was by all indications kind and generous to other writers, allowed the young Bloch to use his creations in Bloch's own stories. But we'll probably never know whether Peirce played any large or lasting part in Robert Bloch's imaginings. Bloch after all went on to a long and illustrious career as an author. All indications are that Earl Peirce, Jr., no longer wrote after the 1940s.

*The FictionMags Index lists "The Cat" as well and is the source of that bit of information.
**I guess we should consider the possibility, too, that Bloch created his own grimoire and author so as to gain entry into Lovecraft's circle. Imagine the satisfaction of a teenaged author whose creation is adopted and used by the Master.

Copyright 2020 Terence E. Hanley